Status of the SeaMonkey Source Tree

Starting with ESR60 2.57 all builds need to switch to mozilla as topsourcedir. Support for comm-central and comm-esr60 as top source dir is being gradually removed from the build files and is no longer supported.

Do not expect to use any 2.58+ release yet other than for checking if it builds. They are fundamentally broken by Mozilla source and api removals. We are currently fixing up 2.57 in the ESR60 repo right now and will tackle this later. Bugs for the 2.57 release will also land in comm-central.

[comm-central]:

Do not use the 2.60 release.

The installer still works...

l10n is broken in comm-central because of search plugin issues. If we switch to search/list.json then we need to keep the l10n searchplugin xml files for esr60 or switch esr60 too.

Mozilla switched to clang for building Windows. VS2017 is now tier 2.

There is more and more needed api and source support taken out of mozilla-central. It is unclear if we will ever be able to use this repo again.

We keep it at least building as long as we can.

See bug 1452448 for current comm-central breakages. This is not up to date.

An updated unofficial 2.53 is available from WG9's website. We accept filing bugs against it but it is only provided for testing purposes on the way to 2.57.

See bug 1379370 for current 2.53 breakages. Tree is at 2.58 already. All known major bugs for 2.53 are closed.

[comm-esr60]:

Sidebar, Help and Mail/News are broken because of XUL template removals. See bug 464710.

Do not expect to use the 2.57 release yet other than for testing.

An unofficial 2.57 is available from WG9's website. We accept filing bugs against it but it is only provided for testing purposes and not very usable at the moment. Please file bugs only against the browser part unless you know a specific problem is new and needs to be fixed. In any case check the existing bug reports to not generate bug noise.

Release Train

SeaMonkey 2.57 will be the next major release after 2.49.x becomes EOL.

2.57 will be build from the comm-esr60 repo.

Thunderbird did release TB 60. Mail and news are still broken in SeaMonkey 2.57.

Thunderbird plans to upgrade 52.x users to 60.1 with the next cycle.

Not all patches with l10n-relevant string changes are done for 2.57. frg has figured out a way to do this using strings from later l10n-central releases (suite directory only). He tried this with a local l10n dir and it turned out ok.

IanN will test it later but there is currently no alternatives presented.

IanN suggested asking Pike or flod about it.

With the preliminary solution no buildbot changes would be needed.

comm-central only patches must not delete any strings in the suite en-US directory until 2.57 is out.

When doing patches please make sure to change the l10n labels when the content changes.

2.49.4 has been released on July 27th

2.49.5 will be done on the new infrastructure only. There is no ETA yet.

Updates from older SeaMonkey versions to 2.49.4 are currently not working (including from 2.48 or 2.49.x). This has been announced on the project page.

ewong tries to fix the update process for the aus3 server. This is broken since 2.48 and did not block the 2.49.4 release.

A meta bug for gtk3 compatibility has been created for 2.49.1 and up bug 1367257.

cZ, DOMi and the Lightning extension will again be excluded because of the l10n problem tracked in bug 1231349.

We are evaluating doing official Linux and Windows x64 builds for a future 2.49.x release. This will only happen when the new infrastructure is ready.

IanN will look into including My and pt-BR locales in a future 2.49.x. frg can create patches based on l10n-release and l10n-central suite but these would need to be manually fixed by the translators and checked into a comm-release branch. We did this with nb-NO in bug 1391174.

Because 2.57 is not yet ready we plan to backport security fixes for future 2.49.x releases.

We will set up new branches in comm-esr52 and mozilla-esr52 for building future 2.49.x releases.

frg did backport all but 3 ESR60.2 fixes. He will look into TB 60 Bugs and the prerequisites for the missing fixes later.

frg also backported support for VS2017 and the latest Windows toolkit to 2.49. We will check this into the new release branch if needed.

The new fixes and backported security fixes can be found on Bills wg9s website. They include the older TB52 verbranch fixes and can be used to do a completely new mozilla-esr52 branch for SeaMonkey. They need to be evaluated before checkin. Some private fixes need to be taken out.

An official 2.53 Beta might be done later.

A release would need l10n translations. The temporary solution for 2.57 will not work for this release.

A release would need further security fixes. frg tries to keep it as current as possible in his spare time.

The big security problems which were in the public are fixed but there are still some missing.

NSS 3.38 NSPR 4.19 and so TLS 1.3 has been backported.

The last known regression compared to 2.49.x has been fixed in 2.53.

Bill posted the patch files from frg containing the backported source and fixes on his wg9s website for 2.53.

frg maintains the patches for 2.53 on gitlab in a private repo. Anyone who wants access can send him an email but Bills repo is usually up to date.

The repo minus any private fixes could be used to create beta branches for 2.53.

IanN thinks we can do a 2.53 branch in c-r and m-r so that we can include the backported bugs.

Discussions if we should match minor version numbers with Firefox are still underway. This would need a coordinated change for either c-c or all trees. All minor versions would be changed and the versions would need to be made available in bugzilla. Lightning version calculation needs to be changed. This will be done at a later date and not for 2.49 ESR.

[2] redirects to it. 2.57 has already been switched over to the new site in bug 1475799. This can be done for 2.49 too if needed.

The old add-ons website api has been removed in bug 1402064 for Gecko 60 and up. We might need to do some further porting here to smoothly

integrate installation from the add-ons site.

For Thunderbird a new add-on [3] is available to switch addons-mozilla.org to thinderbird net.

2.57, comm-central and the inofficial 2.53 already have updated prefs. We plan to do this for a future 2.49 release.

We will evalute the possibility of shipping pdf.js with SeaMonkey in a future release. frg will look into it when he finds some time.

2.x (Last, Current, Next)

SeaMonkey Statistics can be viewed at https://dataviz.mozilla.org Across all channels we have an approximate ADU of 120k. ADI is about 116,000 on 2.48; about 597,000 on 2.46. Unclear how this translates into installations but around 70.000 users are on the release channel.

Old add-on signing methods has been removed. SeaMonkey and Thunderbird still use them per thread "removing "the old way" of signing add-ons" in mozilla.dev.platform. Apparently dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/so…sions/content/xpinstallConfirm.xul contain the references to them.

Unused (in mozilla-central code) xbl bindings are slowly removed. We are being informed about this. stefanh and paenglab did fix the first removals. A shared directory for moved bindings used in all comm-central products has been created.

2.49.x current releases

2.57.x next release branch

2.Next

frg did cross compile all relevant trees on Linux starting with comm-esr52 sucessfully using the instructions from IanN in bug 1379062. He has a small cross compile guide available.

We might need to make this work fast with the current Linux builders to still be able to compile Nightly if the last builder fails.

The new MacStadium Mini Mac can currently not access some internal sites and is right now not usable for producing builds.

It is not sure if the cross-compile can create universal macOS 2.49.x builds needed for plugin suppprt but this will only become urgent if the last Mac Mini dies. macOS support for x86 applications is discontinued anyway.

Building with the 10.11 SDK need the fixes in bug 1391790 for macOS 10.13.

For cross compiling a recent Rust cross package and the cross toolchains are needed. For local use they can be extracted from any Firefox macOS taskcluster build.

frg suggests doing an about:credits page for SeaMonkey contributors. This should link to a new list of people on the SeaMonkey project page.

IanN suggests about:smcredits.

The mozilla credits page still must be linked because there are many SeaMonkey contributors in it and Gecko is also still the foundation we did and are building on.

Tests are broken. Priority for new features or ports according to IanN is to get the code working.

frg suggests splitting off the tests to separate bugs for tracking and hopefully fixing in the future.
With the current dev resources at hand he is not very hopeful about fixing the tests anytime soon.

There are reports that the PayPal donation on the website doesn't work for USD. It seems the amount is converted to Euro (probably correct if it is a German account).

Images should be vectorized and be svg if possible for future updates and HiDPI compatibility.

bug 1414390 needs to be ported. intl.locale.requested locale list needs to replace general.useragent.locale. Thunderbird did this in bug 1423532.

We need to evaluate if a user agent switcher should be incorporated into SeaMonkey. More and more websites (usps, google) do wrong browser sniffing either deliberately or just using sloppy code. The result is that our users are no longer able to visit these websites without setting a specific UA for it.

Roundtable - Personal Status Updates

IanN generally will handle more complex review requests. frg, rsx11m, stefanh and ewong can also do reviews in their areas of expertise. For bigger changes and branch approvals outside of the build system IanN needs to be involved.

a+ from trusted regular patch authors/reviewers for ESR60 / 2.57 is implied as long as it only affects the suite directory. This will change back to a general needed a+ when the tree becomes more stable and will be announced then. If in doubt ask for approval.

Status Updates from developers - what are you working on, what's the progress, any other comments? (feel free to add yourself to the list if your name is missing and you have interesting status).

ewong

frg

Waiting for review:

Nothing ready for action.

Waiting for feedback:

Nothing ready for action.

Waiting for branch approval:

Patches for a new mozilla-esr52 SeaMonkey 2.49 branch are at WG9's 2.49 webpage. These include all TB52 verbranch fixes. We just need to decide what to take. No bug yet.

Checkin ready:

Nothing ready for action

Working on:

Backporting ESR 60.2 fixes to 2.49.5

Backporting platform support for VS2017, later Rust and later clang for macOS.

bug 1474490 Restore spinbox and number boxes in SeaMonkey. Next in line for 2.57

Port of bug 1100103 Add a remove button to every To/CC/BCC address in Composer. No bug yet.

Helping MMR with bug 1444740 Drop support for -moz-border-*-colors in SeaMonkey.

bug 1296850 Show standard loading indicator images in tab when busy or progress attribute are set. Asked someone who wants to help out to look at the icons. Got the icons but have no time at the moment.